NYAB Event - Guy Ben Ner “Soundtrack”

Guy Ben Ner “Soundtrack”

Postmasters Gallery

This event has ended.

In his most recent video Ben Ner creates an alternative family drama played out to an appropriated audio track from Steven Spielberg’s 2005 “War of the Worlds.”

“Soundtrack” has light but also very dark fun with Spielberg’s apocalyptic blockbuster
Lori Waxman, Chicago Tribune

“Soundtrack” is a powerful work
Dalia Karpel, Haaretz

Guy Ben Ner is the Tom Cruise of Israel, and SOUNDTRACK is his Risky Business!
Greg Allen, Twitter

In “Soundtrack” a family lives out the drama of the world
Alicia Eller, hyperallergic

Postmasters Gallery presents a show of new videos by Guy Ben Ner, his first exhibition in New York since 2010. The show will present two works: “Soundtrack” and “Foreign Names.”

Currently based in Tel-Aviv, Ben Ner is known for his low-tech “home movies” of ingenious inventiveness in which the fine lines between stealing, appropriating, re-using, refreshing and abusing what already exists are frequently crossed. In each of Ben Ner’s videos the cinematic means of production are being reassigned, most often by utilizing what is out there already, in the service of a new narrative. In the two videos on view at Postmasters, Ben Ner exploits the field of sound, whether the audio of a Hollywood film, or the utilitarian microphones of his chosen shooting locations.

In “Soundtrack” (2013) an epic narrative is subversively domesticated; Ben Ner, his family and friends re-enact eleven minutes of Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.” Tom Cruise’s dysfunctional yet heroic father protecting his children from the world-conquering aliens is recalibrated sound for sound by Ben Ner, whose own drama is set in his family’s apartment in Tel Aviv. Small kitchen disasters of exploding blenders and stoves, broken bottles, flying fried eggs and falling toys are a stand-in for the extraterrestrial horror story, occasionally punctuated by real-life video footage of the Israeli-Lebanon and Palestinian conflicts streaming on the family laptop. Heroic and pathetic gestures are forever intertwined as we are left with the question which of the movies is more real. in the end you have two movies, like Siamese twins, sharing one and the same organ: The Sound. needless to say, one of the twins is a thief. the other- a property owner (Guy Ben Ner).

“Foreign Names” (2012), the second video in the exhibition, was shot in “Aroma,” an Israeli coffee-shop chain, where microphones replaced the waiters for economic efficiency: the customer steps up to the counter, gives his order and his name, only to be called later through the microphone when it is ready.
Ben Ner visited close to 100 different “Aroma” branches in order to record (candidly and without permission) the images and vocals of the Aroma personnel, as they are calling out different invented names he used to place his order.
Edited together the names make up an Ode, a lamentation to the disappearance of the waiters. The sound of the work and the performance of the workers is stolen by the artist from the company’s microphones, and turned against the owners. This fragmented, collectivist Ode, realizable only through Ben Ner’s orchestrations, is unknowingly voiced by the workers themselves, through the very instrument of their obsolescence.

Guy Ben Ner was born in Ramat Gan, Israel in 1969, studied at Hamidrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College and received an MFA from Columbia University in New York. He represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and has exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center; the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv; The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; The Center for contemporary Art (CCA), Tel Aviv; and the Musee d’art contemporain Montreal (MACM). In 2009, MASS MoCA presented his retrospective “Thursday the 12th.” Ben Ner’s work was included in Skulptur Projekte, Münster; the Shanghai Biennale; and the Liverpool Biennial. He was commissioned to produce a video “Drop the Monkey” for Performa Biennial. This summer he will participate in the Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, curated by Kasper Koenig.